It is, in its own fashion, a ballpark—there are dugouts,
(Though more kin to lean-tos if the truth be told)
A fence with advertisements, though its paint is cracked and faded,
And some of those firms testifying
To being tops in collars and canned foods
Have long since changed names or flat-out gone under,
But a ballpark nonetheless, and if you squint your eyes
Or find some other convenient method of self-delusion,
You can convince yourself it is a rather fine thing,
Happily oblivious to the fact that the infield
Is all bumps and tiny moraines
Covered with crownvetch and chickweed masquerading as grass,
The outfield rife with bark scorpions
Who frequently wander inside the lines.
Milling about this somewhat-short-of-pastoral greenish patch,
Wearing uniforms of a reasonable homogeny,
Is a curious, potentially combustible group of men:
Honest-to-goodness big leaguers whose off-field proclivities
Led Judge Landis to excuse them further participation,
Rope-muscled miners from Bisbee,
Carbide-lamp helmets tucked under their arms,
Callow boys taking a chance on this decidedly last-chance town,
One or two others with tangibly acute reasons
For staying in close proximity to the Mexican border.
Holding court in the midst of this collection
Is a man whose face was not visited by the smallpox
As much as it was wrapped up in its full embrace;
It’s old Charlie Comiskey who should be in jail, he grumbles
Man has more money’n he’ll ever need,
Hell, more than Stoneham or Ruppert.
No reason in the world he couldn’t pay his boys a fair wage,
But he treated ‘em like dogs, and if you starve it long enough,
Why, even the most loyal dog will turn on a man,
Ain’t that right boys?, and a pair of his listeners,
Men named Chick and Swede
Who know of Comiskey’s parsimony first-hand,
Grimly nod their heads in agreement.
The speaker pauses for a moment, and as he does
He produces, seemingly from nowhere, a hip flask
(Brought forth like a seasoned magician
Pulling flowers from some gauzy handkerchief,
Or a card sharp finding an extra king in the very air itself)
And takes a long draught before continuing.
Look, I love this game--hell, no man loves it more
But it’s still just a **** game,
Just entertainment, like a circus or a rodeo.
Maybe we a took a few liberties with a game here and there,
But, you know, I knew folks who’d see the same Broadway show
Three, maybe even four times;
They knew how it would turn out, I reckon,
But it didn’t keep them from spending four bucks a ticket.
Well, what’s a ballplayer but an entertainer?
We still put on a good show, and no one gets hurt,
But because it’s a ballgame, you’d think we’d spit on the cross.
With this, the circle breaks up, and men head to spots on the field
To field lazy fungoes and toss the ball around the infield,
And most of the on-lookers soon head back toward town
(Perhaps back to work at one of the smelters,
Their stacks blowing forlorn clouds into otherwise endless skies,
Or maybe to one of the sad houses on the far side of town
Where haunted-eyed Mexican ****** mechanically light candles
In supplication to saints whose efficacy they’ve come to doubt)
But the stragglers who stay behind are treated to the first baseman
Make a marvelous, almost magical, pickup of a short-hop throw
With the easy nonchalant brilliance which at one time
Brought hundreds, no thousands, of men to their feet in disbelief,
And as he sweeps his glove upward, he laughs
(Though with just a touch of restraint, a trace of the rehearsed)
And says See, boys? Once you are big league,
You are always big league.

Seeping out from Asia’s shore
The Miasma from the evermore,
A creature from the Scarlet Tide
Permeating out to hide
Indiscriminately, through man,
To decimate, in stealth, by plan.
Across the globe, throughout the world
Insinuating self, unfurled,
So deadly in its secret way
Of insisting humankind, now pay.

Insidiously slipping by on gossamer mute wings
Invisibilities’ blue tide of lethality hued things,
Slipping by to render all across the spectrum wide  
Causing indiscriminate suffering amid the flotsam tide.

America is failing, Africa now seethes
India is reeling and all Europe concedes.
Britain is defeated and China’s telling lies.
Now the whole planet’s bleeding as this organism writhes.
Financial systems decimated right across the globe
As nations stall in lockdown and economy’s disrobe.
The dominos are falling, now, one by one, for all
And the killer is, this plague is with us till the Judgement Call.

M.
New Zealand
15 August 2020

Janet and I awoke before the freezing dawn to a cacophony emitting
from my phone. A deafening, repetitive alarm
....What the Hell is that?
My immediate thought was of a massive tsunami wave threatening the  nations shore???

Coronavirus has re-infected us and the government has jolted us out of  sleep to take the matter seriously.

Auckland has been slammed back to Level 3, the rest of NZ to level 2. We have a Polynesian family of 5 who have all been tested positive from an unknown community source.

This has jarred New Zealand out of its smug complacency. This has shocked us all beyond belief. We all truly believed that we were beyond this menace, but the insidious plague has reinserted itself among us.

....and we know not from whence it came?

M
12 August 2020
New Zealand

(from the beautiful messages some of you send me, this my unintended answer, my thanks, my concerns, all brewed and blended, emerging in this the first second of this say, this day)

the day’s light is undecided. Alternating currents of cloudy
and peek-a-boo sunshine are reflecting outward from my insides onto the world exterior as personality is the best envisioning filter, making you and reality mirror each other, and there are no lines, no divisions.

you awake and instant watch water moving; the currency of
water are the surface wavelets, like wind blown hair.  So, what notions  I have going on is that the water wears wigs (shhhh!) just to keep its integral integrity of constant dishonesty, that being its
natural state.

and
recall nature is just your insides eking, leaking out in...wavelets
and wigs.

all this wonderful nonsense is my heart deeded  eking, leaking, in droplets, in constant motion, this water is never placid, never perfectly still, always moving, sometimes rumbling...and she and I talk about not having a child to take care of in the morning as a sad freedom to
pamper and experiment ourselves even as we co-exist in sweats and t-shirts which segues into a conversation how we moderns crave simplicity over the complexity of living in “modern” times, making us vulnerable to leaders who offer promises of draining, return to the good ole days, forgetting that in just forty years the world fought two wars that killed millions, destroyed the landscape, left billions in miserable existence, and yet shaped, still shapes, the world via today’s unraveling global structure...

so I return to the water, marveling at its life long deception...motion
constant, to the human eye, random and disorganized, yet balletically
organized with synchronicity and yet above and underneath is a whole world in random cooperation, but not necessarily peaceful coexistence...

a mobile, ever changing jigsaw puzzle where the pieces fit together
for just a second before devolving into a new puzzle and on and on...
the surface calm of our appearances, flecked with expressions, our body reshaping with every step is a testimony to the inconstancy of living and I think I could never write a good enough poem to explain how we each inside and outside coexist with engines of turmoil inside, churning, and the oceans and the rivers exist only to remind us that water comes in many colors, and when we dip even a finger in running flows, we  alter the course of history, humanity, eternity, and all words that end in Y, that are really big, the all encompassing ones;

every thought, every blink, every word, is so revealing and I rejoice, secure in that knowing, for it is the source of creating and here I am creating this one second’s summary and I must stop for here comes another second, another glance asking for love,

like a child climbing into your early morning bed, ear to ear grinning, announcing their presence as their gift to you and the world in general, and of course they are exactly right, like every fluid body of water...